Lots of resonant stuff in this interview.

I found my identity and voice by doing a lot of things poorly for a long time.

I proofread everything I write. Still, there is no better spellchecker than the "publish" button.

I am working on a redesigned website; I am always working on a redesigned website.

Generative A.I. circumvents the process of thinking that comes from writing…so I find its utility limited, to say nothing of its frightening ethics.

one thing I’m finding interesting is that I see people falling into two main camps for the most part. On one side are those who value output and outcome, and how to get there doesn’t seem to matter a lot to them. And on the other are the people who value the process over the result, those who care more about how you get to something and what you learn along the way.

It’s gonna be interesting to see if the two camps will find a way to coexist or if one is going to overwhelm the other.

Agree. People care a lot about craft and satisfaction.

Manuel Moreale’s experience with Spotify feels akin to my experience with lots of products (hence, my edits to generalize his statement):

I’ve been a user for I don’t even remember how long...And over these years I don’t think they added a single feature I find useful. And yet they keep adding all these bizarre new things that I’m always left wondering if I’m a very odd user and other people’s use of [it] is so much different than mine. Like who [does X on a product born to do Y]? Why is a [genre A] app getting into [genre B]? And why does the desktop app need to be restarted every other day?

Kindness is the reason why [I blog]. There’s no other reason. I don’t care about getting a reward. I care about showing people that in this stupid transactional world, we can still be kind to one another. We can still help someone, even if we’ll get nothing in return.

Kinda sucks that one person’s commitment to kindness by blogging on the free and open web will be monetized by LLM ingestion. It’s a rip-off to the giver.

But then again, kindness in the face of being used is what makes it such a radical act.

Everything Manuel says here about self-promotion is how I feel.

the correct approach seems to be…You have to constantly remind people to like and subscribe, to support, to contribute, and to share.

it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".

If you’re the richest company in the world and you can have anything, what’s the one thing you want? More.

Here’s Barry Hess:

I try to imagine what my life would look like if I was stuck with only the relationships geographically close to me. I have those relationships as well, and I treasure them, but they simply cannot offer the diversity of thought, background, and experience that digital relationships allow. I’m so incredibly thankful to live in an era where I can have the best of both worlds.

This was via Manuel’s post along with his commentary:

The global nature of the web is an underappreciated quality. Like, can we just stop for a second and appreciate the fact that I’m typing this while sitting in Italy and you’re reading this somewhere else on the globe? It’s fucking amazing.

Amazing indeed. And I couldn’t agree more.

I like this observation about the innate compassion induced by the form of blogging (especially in contrast with social media):

In his early drafts [George Saunders] says he’s inclined to be initially sarcastic and throughout his editing process he tries to be more specific and less boring. George noticed for his writing this has a tendency towards love and compassion. I want to emulate that as much as possible…I can be sarcastic myself, so I try to be eager to give grace to anything I’m writing about. I am not perfect at this. It takes practice and iterations (rewriting!). The “slow” speed of making a blog post gives more space for this. And social medias have a strong tendency away from that compassion.

Redesigning your personal website is one of life’s great pleasures.

[AI] will not replace what you mean for the people around you.

on a platform like YouTube, the users are split into probably two major camps. There's the camp of people who just love the creation process and they make videos to express their creativity and they don't care about the platform itself. Those are the people who'd make videos even if YouTube wasn't a thing. And then there's the camp of people who see YouTube as a career or a business opportunity. They're in the game to make money and if a path to that is to just copy other people's content and thumbnails so be it.

Manuel puts his finger on something I’ve long felt around how I curate my RSS feed. I would estimate this is the makeup of my feed:

• 70% are individuals who blog to blog — no underlying monetization to their personal feed, they do it because they like to (e.g. Manuel himself).
• 20% are individuals whose blog constitutes some part of their business (e.g. Josh Comeau’s personal site, or Harry Roberts at CSS Wizardry)
• 10% are companies who exist as a business and have a blog (e.g. Netlify’s blog)

I like to stay abreast of what’s hot, but the real interesting, varied stuff comes from individuals who will “not stop doing what they do because they simply enjoy the process of creation”. Their content is more than just variations on a press release of whatever’s mainstream in tech at the moment.

SEO optimised content, AKA fucking garbage

Lol, yeah.

We yell and scream when we hear about big social media companies doing godawful things with our data and attention, yet we have no issues applying the stupidest marketing tricks to sell some service or product.

…now it's ChatGPT and AI generation era where everyone is trying to sell some AI service that generates something, even if that something has close to zero value...

…What the fuck are we doing here?

What should you blog about? Just blog about anything you find interesting and thought-provoking. And use it to reply to people whose content you find interesting. Blogs are more fun when they’re used to have conversations.

Want to have an unblockable, unbannable user profile? Buy yourself a domain and get a personal website. Want to have a space where you can say and do whatever the fuck you want? Get a webspace and put up a blog. Do you want to keep up with what other people are doing and saying online? Start using RSS or, and this is gonna sound like a very radical idea, bookmark their websites and every once in a while open them in your browser and see what they're up to. Want to also have discussions? Add comments to your website. Don't care about other people's opinions? Don't add comments to your site.

The entire society behaves like a drug addict. We know we have a problem collectively but we do nothing to actually help ourselves.

User Hostile Experience is what I call the ever growing trend of making websites as annoying as possible for the average user in order to improve some idiotic metric no one cares about. I'm talking about Twitter forcing me to register or log in in order to read tweets. I'm talking about Instagram forcing me to register or log in in order to play a video a second time. I'm talking about websites forcing me to click through endless pages to improve their page views. And the list goes on and on and on